Its tearing away the entire fabric of society.We know it goes on but we dont need it thrust down our throat (excuse the pun) 24/7

Tearing away the fabric of society? You might be gay because you sound like a drama queen—and a bigot. Your “fabric” attitudes could be heard in the 50s and 60s when African Americans started to appear in films and on television in roles other than maids, porters, and other servants. Guess what? Homosexuality has been around since antiquity in every country, on every continent, and in virtually all species from fish, to birds, to land mammals. If society has been undermined by representations of sexuality look to heterosexual portrayals because that is where the damage was done: premarital sex, women being raped, the sexualization of children... the list of heterosexual licentiousness is endless.

Tearing away the fabric of society? You might be gay because you sound like a drama queen—and a bigot. You “fabric” attitudes could be heard in the 50s and 60s when African Americans started to appear in films and on television in roles other than maids, porters, and other servants. Guess what? Homosexuality has been around since antiquity in every country, on every continent, and in virtually all species from fish, to birds, to land mammals. If society has been undermined by representations of sexuality look to heterosexual portrayals because that is where the damage was done: premarital sex, women being raped, the sexualization of children... the list of heterosexual licentiousness is endless.

I slept with quite a few women and was married. sex is only part of being gay. and i think that most bi sexual people are just scared of coming out of that closet. it don't matter if its males or females i don't think there is any such thing as bisexual.

First let me get this out of the way, I know this is an old post to which I am replying now.

The first time I officially had gay sex was when I was fifteen (let me qualify this by saying that I don't count an early teen circle jerk with several school chums one afternoon after school in the den at my parent's house as being gay sex). However, I thought about/fantasized sex with a man before that time.

I was fairly sexually experienced by the time I met my future wife at eighteen (we married when I was twenty). I wasn't looking to get married when I met her. Living in West Hollywood, CA in the early 1960's and working in display for a major department store, I didn't exactly feel a need to hide my sexuality in the "closet". So, for me your theory about bisexuals doesn't apply.

My wife and I will be married forty-seven years this October. We've had a really good life together. However, one could argue that that her description of me as her complicated husband is apt. At our age sex today isn't as big a deal as it once was. So with respect to that, our life together is considerably less complicated (by my extra curricular activities) than it was in the beginning of our marriage.

I think BayGBM is correct. It takes all kinds of people and all manner of situations to make up this world. I don't judge others for what they do as long as they don't intentionally hurt other folks. In order to manage my chosen life, I compartmentalized my feelings. Once I was with my wife, I decided I was no longer available to others in a romantic sense. Having sex is easy. Making a commitment, falling or being in love is a whole other issue. I love my wife.

Gay military magazine to be distributed at Army, Air Force basesBy Ed O'Keefe

With the military on the verge of allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly, Army and Air Force officials have approved the distribution of a magazine targeting gay service members at bases starting next month.

OutServe Magazine will hit store shelves at Army and Air Force bases on Sept. 20, the day the Pentagon plans to formally end enforcement of the “don’t ask, don'tI tell” policy that bans gays from serving openly.

The publication is published by OutServe, a group of secretly gay active duty service members that says it has hundreds of members currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The magazine, which began publishing in the spring, is currently available in limited supply at some public meeting areas and military physicians offices, the group said.

Once the nearly two-decade-old ban ends, gay men and women serving in military uniform will be able to reveal their sexual identity without fear of dismissal or official rebuke, openly gay men and women will be able to enlist in the military, and gay couples may be allowed to wed at military chapels or live together on military bases in states that recognize same-sex marriages.

The White House, Pentagon and gay rights groups are expected to host a series of events next month to mark the change.

WASHINGTON — Now it can be told: A prominent gay rights advocate who called himself J. D. Smith is in fact 1st Lt. Josh Seefried, a 25-year-old active-duty Air Force officer. At 12:01 a.m. Tuesday, he dropped the pseudonym, freed from keeping his sexual orientation secret like an estimated tens of thousands of others in the United States military.

“I always had the feeling that I was lying to them and that I couldn’t be part of the military family,” said Lieutenant Seefried, who helped found an undercover group of 4,000 gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender active-duty service members. “I feel like I can get to know my people again. When I go to a Christmas party, I can actually bring the person I’m in a relationship with. And that’s a huge relief.”

The 18-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy officially ended at midnight and with it the discharges that removed more than 13,000 men and women from the military under the old ban on openly gay troops. To mark the historic change, gay rights groups are planning celebrations across the country while Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, will usher in the new era at a Pentagon news conference.

The other side will be heard, too: Elaine Donnelly, a longtime opponent of allowing gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the armed forces, has already said that “as of Tuesday the commander in chief will own the San Francisco military he has created.” Two top Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee — the chairman, Representative Howard P. McKeon of California, and Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina — have asked the Pentagon to delay the new policy, saying commanders in the field are not ready. But the Pentagon has moved on.

No one knows how many gay members of the military will come out on Tuesday, although neither gay rights advocates nor Pentagon officials are expecting big numbers, at least not initially.

“The key point is that it no longer matters,” said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “Our feeling is that the day will proceed like any other day.”

Gen. Carter F. Ham, who was a co-director of a Pentagon study on repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell,” said last week that he expected the effect to be “pretty inconsequential.”

That is not the case for Lieutenant Seefried, an Air Force Academy graduate and a budget analyst at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey, who had to work in the shadows with the Pentagon in an 18-month effort to change the policy.

As Lieutenant Seefried told it in a recent telephone interview, in late 2009 a civilian instructor at a technical training course found out through social networking sites that the lieutenant is gay and began harassing him. Lieutenant Seefried reported the instructor in early 2010, and the instructor responded by outing him. Under the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, Lieutenant Seefried was temporarily removed from his job. But around the same time, Robert M. Gates, who was then defense secretary, changed the rules so service members could not be discharged by third-party outings. “That saved my career,” Lieutenant Seefried said.

Back in his job, Lieutenant Seefried began building what eventually became OutServe, a group of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender active-duty service members connected by secret Facebook groups and e-mail lists. In April 2010, he spoke for the first time publicly against “don’t ask, don’t tell” at the State University of New York at Oswego, but under a pseudonym he had hastily created for the occasion — J.D., for his initials, Josh David, and Smith because it is his mother’s maiden name. He asked the group of about 70 students and administrators at Oswego not to take pictures of him or out him on the Internet. No one did.

“It was a risk I was willing to take,” he said. “There were a lot of times I should have been caught last year doing this, but I never was.”

When Lieutenant Seefried appeared on television, his face was always in shadow, although he did not disguise his voice. “I thought that was too creepy,” he said. “I wanted to appear as human as possible.”

Then last summer, something surprising happened — the Pentagon reached out to him. The department was conducting a broad study of the effects of repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell” but was stumped by how to interview active-duty gay and lesbian service members without having to discharge them under the rules of the policy. Working through a civilian liaison to OutServe, Lieutenant Seefried gave the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation — which was conducting a survey of service members — access to his database.

When the final study was presented to the Senate, many of the quotations read at the hearings were from members of OutServe.

In December, he was invited to the White House when President Obama signed into law the bill repealing “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

“I was there as Josh,” he said. “You can’t go into these events with a pseudonym.” Although other gay rights advocates knew who he really was, the Defense Department never knew — or at least chose not to know.

On Tuesday, the lieutenant will appear at a Capitol Hill news conference with senators who pushed for the repeal. In October comes the publication of a book he edited, “Our Time: Breaking the Silence of ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”’ (Penguin Press).

Lieutenant Seefried said he was happy to say goodbye to J. D. Smith. “There’s not a day when you don’t think of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ when you live under this policy,” he said. “It consumes your thought process, it consumes your future, because of the fear of getting caught. I never thought I would see the repeal of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ during my military career.”

SANTA FE, N.M. — Like so many others who have settled here, Janice Gaynor and her partner, Barbara Cohn, wanted to retire somewhere where they could be themselves, whether that meant holding hands in public or making decisions about each other’s end-of-life health care.

So when RainbowVision swung open its doors in 2006 as one of the first retirement communities in the country to proudly serve gay men and lesbians, offering elegant adobes where people could live out their lives among friends, the couple could not move in fast enough.

“This was our safety valve,” Ms. Gaynor said.

These days, that promise is all but forgotten. RainbowVision has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, racked by financial problems and an increasingly bitter dispute between residents and management. Its problems mirror those of many other gay retirement communities around the country that have either failed to open or fallen on hard times, victims of a weakened housing market, a deflated economy and, in some cases, poor business decisions.

They were once hailed as havens where the so-called Stonewall generation — the first “out” group of senior citizens — could age without being treated with hostility or forced back into the closet. But such communities in Austin, Tex.; Boston and in the Phoenix area never opened because of a lack of finances and a decline in real estate values. A development near Portland, Ore., is struggling at 25 percent of capacity, and another near Sarasota, Fla., has, like RainbowVision, filed for bankruptcy.

“It’s very concerning to see places like RainbowVision having trouble, both because older people need them and because they’re an important community institution,” said Michael Adams, executive director of Services and Advocacy for G.L.B.T. Elders. The group, which is known as SAGE, is pushing for improved housing options for elderly gay men, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people.

Many are growing older without the support of children or extended family members. Gay and lesbian seniors are twice as likely to live alone, according to SAGE. A 2010 report by the group also found that nursing homes often failed to protect gay men and lesbians from hostile treatment by staff or other patients. In a study released in April by the National Senior Citizens Law Center, many older gay men and lesbians and their family members reported instances of mistreatment at long-term care centers. The study also noted that social service providers said it was unsafe for residents to be openly gay at such facilities.

Potential residents of retirement communities, however, may be less inclined to sell their homes and move away during tough economic times. And because developments for older gay people have emerged only within the last 15 years or so, they may not have the financial reserves to weather an economic crisis, Mr. Adams said. As a result, housing options tailored to the estimated 1.5 million elderly people in the United States who are gay are especially limited.

Before buying a condominium at RainbowVision, Ms. Gaynor, a former school administrator, toured a traditional retirement community in Florida, but left with the distinct feeling that she and Ms. Cohn were not welcome.

The fear of suddenly being hurled back into a world that is not always friendly has divided residents at both RainbowVision and the Palms of Manasota, a small community near Sarasota on Florida’s Gulf Coast whose developers filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy last year. A local bank foreclosed on unfinished buildings and a number of empty units at the Palms, and there is uncertainty about who will buy the foreclosed land.

“There was a lot of contentiousness, and the bank hasn’t given any indication on what they plan to do,” said Ron Lennon, president of one of two homeowners’ associations at the Palms. He said his support for the bankruptcy angered fellow residents who feared what could happen to the community. “There are still people here who won’t talk to me.”

For those who have invested, both emotionally and financially, in retirement communities that never got off the ground, the prospect of having to drastically change their plans is daunting.

Alice Fisher, a retired caterer, is weighing her options after plans for Boston’s first retirement community geared toward gay people were abandoned in 2008 after a major investor dropped out.

Ms. Fisher, 70, lost her $10,000 investment in the community. The developer, Stonewall Miner LLC, has since filed for bankruptcy. Ms. Fisher, who is single and owns her home, is contemplating moving into a rental for the first time, or to another retirement community.

“I thought it was really, really too bad,” she said. “This felt important because it felt like we were the last generation who were going to be able to do something like this because the economy has changed so much.”

The battle at RainbowVision has unsettled the once-harmonious group of about 100 residents, about half of whom are straight. It involves reduced services and the steeply rising monthly fee for use of a popular common building that includes a restaurant, a salon and a gym. The fee increase has strained the finances of some of the residents.

RainbowVision’s chief executive and president, Joy Silver, said that the cost of running the community had skyrocketed and that the flailing economy had slowed leasing activity for the community’s condominiums.

Many condo owners, including Ms. Gaynor and Ms. Cohn, began refusing to pay the common building fee and have been banned from using the building.

Ms. Silver, who founded RainbowVision with help from other investors, attributed much of the ill will to speculators who bought units but never lived there. “What’s difficult is watching people who are full of fear worry about what’s going to happen to them and watching them go through the challenges of aging,” she said. “If it were up to me, everything would be free. But that’s not pragmatic or realistic.”

In June, an arbitrator in the dispute between residents and the management decided that though RainbowVision had not broken any laws, it was overcharging residents based on the services it was providing. (An attorney for RainbowVision responded that the arbitrator had not taken into account how expensive it had become to operate the community.) In the bankruptcy court filings, RainbowVision’s lender described the atmosphere at the community as “terrible and openly hostile,” and called for the management to be replaced.

“Every one of us had this starry-eyed vision of what we thought RainbowVision was going to be, and we thought we were working toward a common goal,” said David Garrity, 62, who also stopped paying the disputed fee because of the lack of services.

Mr. Garrity, who has not fully moved into his condominium yet, said he had overlooked red flags about the company’s finances because he was excited to be part of a project he called “a dream” for gay men and lesbians. “Here we are, the victims, victimized by their own,” he said.

Not everyone here has sided against RainbowVision’s management. John Wojtkowski, who is disabled, has been renting there since the summer and praised the company for being responsive to his needs.

But Mr. Wojtkowski, who worked on Wall Street for nearly 30 years, said he was worried. “We used to kid around when we were younger and say, ‘Are we just going to sit around on a porch?’ There was no place for us,” he said. “I don’t hide the fact that I’m gay. When I came here, I felt like I could be myself.”

“I don’t want to go back in the closet again,” he added. “Without RainbowVision, there’s no other place to go.”

The few gay people that I've met were pretty cool. Though most gays were what I call effeminate. Never met a viril dude that openly said he was into dudes. Only met 4 lesbians and one looked like a woman the others were unappetizing and crude.Only "gay/lesbian" people I don't like are those who really aren't and think it makes them interesting if they pretend to be.

I wish everybody, regardless of boink - orientation, a good fuck as often as possible.

The few gay people that I've met were pretty cool. Though most gays were what I call effeminate. Never met a viril dude that openly said he was into dudes. Only met 4 lesbians and one looked like a woman the others were unappetizing and crude.Only "gay/lesbian" people I don't like are those who really aren't and think it makes them interesting if they pretend to be.

I wish everybody, regardless of boink - orientation, a good fuck as often as possible.

The few gay people that I've met were pretty cool. Though most gays were what I call effeminate. Never met a viril dude that openly said he was into dudes. Only met 4 lesbians and one looked like a woman the others were unappetizing and crude.Only "gay/lesbian" people I don't like are those who really aren't and think it makes them interesting if they pretend to be.

I wish everybody, regardless of boink - orientation, a good fuck as often as possible.

The End

That sounds so silly to me. Unless you live on a remote island somewhere you meet gays and lesbians every day--you just don't realize it. If you follow bodybuilding or train at a gym then you see gay guys every day: some obvious, some out, some closeted, some bi curious . . .

That sounds so silly to me. Unless you live on a remote island somewhere you meet gays and lesbians every day--you just don't realize it. If you follow bodybuilding or train at a gym then you see gay guys every day: some obvious, some out, some closeted, some bi curious . . .

Remote island = little town = where I come from.It's clear that there are way more, but I meant those who set it "straight" right from the start. The gym has always been the place for (older) males to terrorize others aka "showering" them with their good looks.

Remote island = little town = where I come from.It's clear that there are way more, but I meant those who set it "straight" right from the start. The gym has always been the place for (older) males to terrorize others aka "showering" them with their good looks.

Here we go with the gay gym stories again. Something must be very different at the gym where I work out because I am not aware of any cruising going on in the locker room, the showers or the pool area. In fact, the only time I recall any "funny stuff" going on was when I worked out a couple of times at a different gym in downtown Portland, OR. The gym was called the Princeton because it was in the basement of the Princeton Hotel. It had the nickname of the Princess because it was so gay. I thought all the blatant cruising was pretty funny actually. I mean, it is not like some dudes going to lose his virginity by force in the locker room of a gym. Any "hanky panky" is by mutual consent.

I've been getting quite a few emails lately asking me all kinds of questions about gay life... so I thought I'd start this thread and invite your questions publicly. If you prefer to ask your questions privately, I'll still answer them and never reveal your name, but there's no need to be shy.

Via private emails, I KNOW I am not the only gay man on getbig.com, but apparently, I am the only one willing to be open on this board. I'm not an expert on all things gay, but I have been around a while and am as educated as anyone here.

Posting a question in this thread does not mean that you are gay or bi; it just means you are curious and there is nothing wrong with that. I will answer any question I can with courtesy and respect.

I'm off to hit legs now but will check in when I get back from the gym.

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - On a hot summer's day in 2008, 26-year-old physics student Ahmet Yildiz was shot dead when he popped out from his Istanbul apartment to buy ice cream.

The main suspect in the killing, a fugitive still wanted by Turkish police, is Yildiz's father, who could not accept that his only son was in a homosexual relationship.

The case, widely believed to be Turkey's first gay "honor killing", has inspired a movie "Zenne", which opened on January 13 and explores gay sexual identity and prejudice in overwhelmingly Muslim Turkey.

"We had the movie idea in mind right after our dear friend Ahmet was killed," said Caner Alper, writer and co-director of the movie. "His story needed to be told."

Yildiz was born into a wealthy religious family in the ancient city of Sanliurfa, in Turkey's impoverished and conservative southeast, but moved to cosmopolitan Istanbul during his university years, seeking more freedom as a gay man.

In Istanbul, Yildiz started a new life and made new friends; he also began a gay relationship and eventually moved in with his boyfriend, who witnessed Yildiz's murder from the window of their apartment on the Asian side of the city divided by the Bosphorus Strait.

In the movie, Yildiz's character is encouraged to come out of the closet by a male belly dancer, or zenne, and a German photographer who has moved to Istanbul after a personal crisis in Afghanistan, where he accidentally caused the death of several children during a photo shoot. Both are fictional characters.

In real life, Yildiz's coming out as a gay man was seen as an affront in his deeply patriarchal and tribal family, even though his parents adored him, a cousin, Ahmet Kaya, told the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.

LOOKING FOR A "CURE"Yildiz's father had urged him to return to their village and to see a doctor and an imam to "cure" him of his homosexuality and get married, but Yildiz refused.

"Ahmet loved his family more than anything else and he was tortured about disappointing them," Kaya was quoted as saying in the foundation's report.

After he was killed, the family did not claim Yildiz's body for a proper Islamic burial -- an indication of the deep shame the family felt and that they had ceased to consider him one of their own. He was buried instead in a "cemetery for the nameless."

"The one scene I wasn't able to distance myself from the character I played as an actor was when Ahmet apologized to his father for being gay on the phone after coming out," Erkan Avci, a young actor who played Yildiz, told Reuters.

"It's such a great tragedy, so cruel and inhumane that anybody has to apologize for who he is."

Avci drew parallels between Ahmet's situation and his own as a Kurd from Diyarbakir province in a country whose Kurdish minority has long complained of discrimination and inequality.

"It would have been immoral for me to turn down this role, as a man who had to apologize for years for being Kurdish," he said.

"Zenne", which won five awards at Turkey's most prestigious film festival, the Antalya Golden Orange, has received a huge amount of attention in mainstream media and is reported to be having reasonable success at the box office.

With a $1 million budget, including financial support from the Dutch embassy, it opened in a luxury movie theatre in one of Istanbul's most fashionable neighborhoods.

Gays are normally depicted in Turkish movies as colorful and exaggerated secondary characters who add a comic element - hardly the main character of a story.

"'Zenne' is a very special film for us. It brings to the screen some of the important issues for the LGBT cause such as hate crimes, the complications for gay men to forego the mandatory military service and coming out," said Umut Guner, spokesman for the Ankara-based Kaos GL, a LGBT group.

PREJUDICEThe film has not been welcomed in conservative circles.

Islamist daily Vakit called it "homosexual propaganda" by a gay lobby bent on "legitimizing perversion through their so-called art."

Despite being the only suspect, Yildiz's father is still at large and is being tried in absentia.

Friends and activists, who have attended some of the hearings wearing masks bearing Yildiz's portrait, say the authorities lack the will to find the perpetrator.

Alper and Mehmet Binay, co-directors of the movie and together as a gay couple for 14 years, said they heard their friend Yildiz receive death threats from his family over the phone.

Yildiz filed an official complaint but failed to receive any protection, they said."Honor killings," or crimes carried out against mostly women and young girls seen to have tainted the family's name, are not uncommon in Turkey, particularly in poor and rural areas.

The European Union, which Turkey wants to join, has repeatedly urged Ankara to take a tougher stance against such crimes.

MILITARY PRACTICESTurkey is often held as an example in the Middle East for marrying Islam and democracy, but Turkish gay activists say Ankara's human rights record is far from perfect.

One practice particularly abhorred by rights groups is the method by which gay men can be exempted from the required 16-month military service: they have to prove their homosexuality in medical tests and are compelled to provide photos of them having sex with other men.

In the movie, two characters undergoing one such examination are forced to wear make-up and dress in women's clothes, while doctors perform anal examinations.

According to Article 17 of the health regulations of the Turkish Armed Forces, homosexuality is considered a "psychosexual deviance."

"Turkey is going through a democratization process, and the army needs to enter this phase, too," said Binay.

"We don't live in a dream world and we don't expect it to happen all of a sudden in such a deep-seated institution, but at least they could stop the humiliating practices against gay men."

Turkish rights groups reported 24 killings of gay and transsexual individuals in the last two years. In most cases, courts reduced the sentences or the perpetrators were not found.

In a report last year, Amnesty International urged Ankara to draw up laws preventing discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation and to punish perpetrators of homophobic attacks.

The EU in a separate report also last year said lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons in Turkey "continued to suffer discrimination, intimidation and violent crimes".

LGBT activists say they get little sympathy from the AK Party, in power for a decade, which has its roots in political Islam and is known for its socially conservative stance.

Selma Aliye Kavaf, Turkey's former Women and Family Affairs Minister, made waves in 2010 when she said homosexuality was "a biological disorder, a disease that needs to be treated".The current interior minister accused an outlawed armed organization with "engaging in every kind of immorality, including homosexuality".

Director Binay said he hoped the movie would help to change views both among government officials and the wider society, but believed that would not happen overnight.

"These movies will be made in Turkey as long as those from different identities refuse to learn to live together."

Former “Sex and the City” star Cynthia Nixon says she is gay by “choice” – a statement that has riled many gay rights activitists who insist that people don’t choose their sexual orientation.

Here’s what Nixon, who recently shaved her head to play a cancer patient in a Broadway production of “Wit,” told the New York Times Magazine:

“I gave a speech recently, an empowerment speech to a gay audience, and it included the line ‘I’ve been straight and I’ve been gay, and gay is better.’ And they tried to get me to change it, because they said it implies that homosexuality can be a choice. And for me, it is a choice. I understand that for many people it’s not, but for me it’s a choice, and you don’t get to define my gayness for me.”

The question of whether sexual orientation is subject to nature or nurture – or some combination of both – has been hotly debated for years. If it is not an immutable characteristic, that would imply that a gay person could be somehow transformed into a straight one. In other words, homosexuality could be “cured.” Which in turn implies that being gay is some sort of illness.

Hence, the offense taken to this point of view.

Nixon seemed to anticipate the controversy her remarks might generate. She also told the New York Times:

“A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if it’s a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesn’t matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here and we are one group and let us stop trying to make a litmus test for who is considered gay and who is not.” Her face was red and her arms were waving. “As you can tell,” she said, “I am very annoyed about this issue. Why can’t it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems we’re just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I don’t think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didn’t realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men I’ve been out with.”

As expected, this did not go over smoothly with everyone. Writing on AmericaBlog Gay, John Aravosis wrote that Nixon “needs to learn how to choose her words better, because she just fell into a right-wing trap, willingly. When the religious right says it's a choice, they mean you quite literally choose your sexual orientation, you can change it at will, and that's bull.”

So, what’s the scientific evidence that sexual orientation is either a biologically determined trait or an actual choice?

A Spanish study published in 2009 in the journal Investigacion Clinica summarizes the evidence for genetic influences. Based on research comparing identical twins, fraternal twins and even siblings who were adopted, scientists have determined that 27% to 76% of the chance that one is gay is determined by DNA. The genetic influence appears to be greater for men than for women, according to the study.

Other stuff is probably happening in utero that influences one’s sexual orientation. As a review article published last year in the journal Endocrinology explains, exposure to atypical levels of testosterone and other steroids in the womb is probably responsible for some people being gay. Another review article, published last year in Frontiers in Neuroendocrinology, makes the same point:

“The evidence supports a role for prenatal testosterone exposure in the development of sex-typed interests in childhood, as well as in sexual orientation in later life, at least for some individuals. It appears, however, that other factors, in addition to hormones, play an important role in determining sexual orientation. These factors have not been well-characterized, but possibilities include direct genetic effects, and effects of maternal factors during pregnancy.”

One of those prenatal influences may be the number of males who have previously inhabited the mother’s uterus. It may sound strange, but Canadian researchers have found that “having one or more older brothers boosts the likelihood of a boy growing up to be gay,” as I explained in a 2006 Los Angeles Times story. As I wrote at the time, “The so-called fraternal birth order effect is small: Each older brother increases the chances by 33%. Assuming the base rate of homosexuality among men is 2%, it would take 11 older brothers to give the next son about a 50-50 chance of being gay.” Those findings were reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

In addition, my colleague Shari Roan wrote about a fascinating controversy surrounding treatment for a rare condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. The disorder can cause girls to be born with genitals that look male, making it hard to tell the baby’s gender. One treatment is to give women hormones during subsequent pregnancies to reduce the risk for siblings. But doctors have found that this approach has an unusual side effect:

“The treatment might reduce the likelihood that a female with the condition will be homosexual,” Roan wrote. “Further, it seems to increase the chances that she will have what are considered more feminine behavioral traits.”

This is all just the tip of the iceberg. But the scientific consensus seems to be that there is indeed a biological basis for homosexuality – though it’s not necessarily 100% determined by either genes or by environmental factors.

This is very interesting. It made me wonder since I'm with a woman and I've "been" with men, much like Cynthia has, but from the male perspective, is this a choice I made or is it all about my genetic makeup? Are there genetic markers for bisexuality? Certainly, I made a choice to marry, but could I have as easily married (partnered with) a man as a woman? I do believe it is in me to love either a man or a woman....love is love. So I chose to fall in love with this one woman....and I believe it was so fated.

To be honest, in one respect I did make a choice and that was to have children. In my day, two guys couldn't have children and realistically they still cannot from the standpoint of passing on ones genes. However, one shouldn't jump to the conclusion that I married my wife because I wanted a someone to bear me children. That is simply not the case at all in my case. I married my wife because she was the person I feel in love with and have continued to love to this day. Anyway, if it was just for the convenience of reproducing, our children have long since grown into adults and yet my wife and I are still together. BTW, neither of us would or could have more children these days, even if we wanted to. So reproduction is not the cement in our relationship.

This is very interesting. It made me wonder since I'm with a woman and I've "been" with men, much like Cynthia has, but from the male perspective, is this a choice I made or is it all about my genetic makeup? Are there genetic markers for bisexuality? Certainly, I made a choice to marry, but could I have as easily married (partnered with) a man as a woman? I do believe it is in me to love either a man or a woman....love is love. So I chose to fall in love with this one woman....and I believe it was so fated.

To be honest, in one respect I did make a choice and that was to have children. In my day, two guys couldn't have children and realistically they still cannot from the standpoint of passing on ones genes. However, one shouldn't jump to the conclusion that I married my wife because I wanted a someone to bear me children. That is simply not the case at all in my case. I married my wife because she was the person I feel in love with and have continued to love to this day. Anyway, if it was just for the convenience of reproducing, our children have long since grown into adults and yet my wife and I are still together. BTW, neither of us would or could have more children these days, even if we wanted to. So reproduction is not the cement in our relationship.

I think bisexuality is a true orientation, but that's not the same as saying one "choses to be gay" as Cynthia Nixon has.